Spectral functions of heavy quarkonia in a bulk-viscous quark gluon plasma

Abstract

Abstract We study the properties of quarkonia inside a bulk-viscous quark gluon plasma. The non-equilibrium nature of the medium is encoded in the deformed distribution functions of thermal quarks and gluons, with which we compute the dielectric permittivity within the hard thermal loop approximation at one-loop. The modified dielectric permittivity is used to calculate the in-medium heavy quark potential, and using the potential we compute spectral functions, which reflect the physical properties of heavy quarkonia. We discuss how the bulk viscous effect influences quantities such as binding energies and thermal widths. Based on those properties, we discuss the implications of the bulk viscous effect on the physical observables such as ψ′ to J/ψ ratio and the nuclear modification factor, RAA. In particular, we argue that the nuclear modification factors of excited and ground states show different sensitivities to the bulk viscous nature of a plasma, which is potentially useful for the critical point search.